More than 30 years after the release of GoldenEye, Famke Janssen (X-Men, A Cry in the Ocean) is revisiting the making of the 17th James Bond film.
After starting out in modeling, the Dutch actress Famke Janssen broke through in Hollywood. Star Trek: The Next Generation, GoldenEye, A Cry in the Ocean, the X-Men saga, Taken… While viewers around the world didn’t always know her by name, they learned to recognize her face, and not only as Jean Grey beside Wolverine. Yet, although she has never stopped working, her appearances in blockbuster films have become rarer in recent years.
So it’s funny to note that it’s while returning to the Netherlands that the actress recently rekindled audience enthusiasm. Her series Amsterdam Empire has been making waves on Netflix, where she had already stepped onto the platform with Hemlock Grove. The moment offered Janssen a chance to reemerge and, in particular, to give interviews about her career. Recently, she has revisited her James Bond experience, which was nothing short of eventful.
FAMKE I LOVE
During a recent masterclass organized by Vanity Fair, Famke Janssen again recounted in detail the grand adventure that was her participation in Martin Campbell’s GoldenEye, the 17th James Bond film and the first of the Pierce Brosnan era. She portrays Xenia Onatopp, a Russian femme fatale who gives the famed British spy a hard time. The actress also shared the casting process for the role:
“I found myself among the three, perhaps four, finalists, and I was sent to London for a filmed screen test with Pierce Brosnan. I remember being very nervous, because I’d never auditioned for anything like this in my life; plus, it was a Russian character with an accent. I didn’t sleep that night… I finally let go, applying everything my acting coach Harold Guskin had taught me. And the rest, you know.”
As Empire notes, Janssen had earned the audition because she was filming The Illusionist for MGM, the same studio that produced the Bond films.
But the adventure didn’t stop there, because during the filming of a scene in which Bond and Onatopp face off in a savage game of seduction, the actress was seriously injured:
“By the way, I did indeed crack some ribs during that scene. The walls were padded and Pierce was supposed to hurl me against the wall. I told him: ‘Pierce, it’s so hard to fake this pain, just throw me into the wall.’ He replied: ‘No, no, no. I don’t want to hurt you.’ I countered: ‘Don’t worry about it, the walls are padded.’ A line I probably should never have said.”
Result: a cracked rib. A injury Janssen didn’t fully grasp until a month later:
“I couldn’t speak at that moment. They had to pause filming for a moment because they couldn’t understand what was happening. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t do anything. In fact, I learned much later, once back in New York — the shoot lasted six months — that I had a cracked rib. We simply kept filming. They didn’t know.”
And that wasn’t the end. The Dutch actress also realized that, for a film of this scale, filming is only part of the job. There’s a heavy promotional push to come:
“You quickly realize, from day one, that there’s a promotional machine behind a Bond film that doesn’t resemble any other franchise, not even the X-Men. […]
With all these years of experience behind it, the team knows exactly how to handle the promotion. In the very first week of filming — when I hadn’t even stepped on set yet — they organized a press conference bringing together 800 journalists, in the form of a series of roundtables. It was the British press, with a reputation all its own. […]
I thought to myself: ‘My God, this is it. This is what we’re going to deal with.’ I was playing a very typified character, a foreigner, and I found myself thrust into the heart of this massive machine. It came with a whole slew of prejudices. I kept thinking: ‘What on earth am I putting my person and my career through?’ I had to constantly pull myself out of the boxes people tried to shove me into.”
As we know, the experience turned out to be rather successful, with this Bond outing rebooting the 007 brand. Today, Famke Janssen speaks of GoldenEye as the springboard the young actress she was hoped for:
“The release of GoldenEye propelled me into the spotlight like never before, granting me both visibility and freedom of choice.”
Unfortunately for Janssen’s fans, the second season of Amsterdam Empire has still not been announced. Her upcoming films, The Experiment (Chee Keong Cheung), One Second After (Scott Rogers), and Turnbuckle (Sean McEwen) remain without release dates in the United States. And of course, many expect she’ll pop up in Avengers: Doomsday, following in the footsteps of her former X‑Men colleagues, though she insists that’s not the case.
